Scripps takes lead in $25 million climate research project

Money from Earth Networks will fund research center, data collection

Technician David Moss at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography takes an air sample on Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean as part of an effort to study atmospheric carbon dioxide around the globe. Scripps research into greenhouse gases got a major boost on Wednesday when the school announced a $25 million partnership with Earth Networks.
— Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Technician David Moss at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography takes an air sample on Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean as part of an effort to study atmospheric carbon dioxide around the globe. Scripps research into greenhouse gases got a major boost on Wednesday when the school announced a $25 million partnership with Earth Networks.
/ Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla — long a leader in climate research worldwide — will take a $25 million step into the future of global warming with an unprecedented scientific collaboration being announced today.

It is joining with Earth Networks, owner of the WeatherBug brand of products and services, to create what the partners call the largest global network designed to track greenhouse gases.

Earth Networks will pump $25 million over five years into the project, which Scripps scientists will guide toward new frontiers of understanding climate-changing gases. The company also will establish a research center for climate science at Scripps, which is part of the University of California San Diego.

“We’d like the conversation about greenhouse gases to get back to the data instead of strongly held political points of view,” said Tony Haymet, director of Scripps. “We’d like people to be arguing about data, using the data in different ways to test hypotheses and shed light on the science behind greenhouse gases.”

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Graduate students: 242

Private gifts and grants: $6 million

Professors: 99

Researchers/project scientists: 85

Revenue: $171 million

Staff: 834

Note: Financial figures for fiscal 2009-10

Only a few dozen locations worldwide continuously monitor greenhouse gases, leaving lots of gaps in analysis. Earth Networks said it will initially deploy 100 gas-observing systems across the globe, beginning with 50 in the continental United States, followed by systems in Europe and other areas.

Researchers are eager to see the numbers, which will help assess regional variations in greenhouse gas emissions and eventually help monitor or manage commitments to trade emissions and reduce them. The current monitoring system doesn’t generally allow for fine-scale assessments.

“What we are going to do is put the earth through a battery of tests by deploying a large number of sensors to measure greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and we going to do that at a scale that has never been done,” said Robert Marshall, chief executive of Earth Networks. “We are going to take the pulse of the planet.”

For instance, the new network is expected to be useful in tracking California’s success in meeting its landmark greenhouse gas law known as AB 32, and eventually to assess developing countries such as India and China, where emissions have grown rapidly in the past few years.

Earth Networks expects to make money by selling sophisticated assessments to agencies and companies, such as major energy firms, that need to pinpoint their carbon footprints.

On a simpler level, the company plans to make carbon dioxide measurements a regular part of the weather data it publishes online.

“Hopefully, we can bring it to life for the public in a way that has not been done before to get them engaged,” Marshall said. “When you check your weather every day ... you can see what’s going on with greenhouse gases in your local community as well.”

He said Scripps was chosen because its scientists are “the best of the best.”

The partnership builds on Scripps’ historical prominence in tracking and interpreting atmospheric changes. In the late 1950s, the late Charles David Keeling of Scripps started tracing the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His work eventually became known as the Keeling Curve, one of the most important scientific discoveries in the 20th Century.

Haymet, who took the helm in 2006, has devoted much of the past few years to courting private donors who he hopes will help compensate for eroding financial support from the state. Scripps runs on about $171 million a year from federal, state and private sources.

He praised Earth Networks for providing money and said the company’s needs for proprietary information will leave researchers at Scripps and elsewhere with much more data than they were likely to get on their own.

“We look like we are heading into a budget (era) where science grants will be hard to come by,” Haymet said. “It could have taken me and my colleagues 10 years maybe to raise that kind of money.”

To read about the challenges facing Scripps, click here. To learn more about the institution's distinguished history, click here.